Web Site Analytics
Importance of Web Analytics
Web Analytics is the collection and analysis of data about usage of your Web site. There are a number of good solutions available, including a number of free services. The most well-known free service is Google Analytics (see below for how to use it). There are excellent reasons for using some flavor of Web analytics, and no good reasons for not using it.
- See how people are finding your site: by typing in the URL, by following a link, by using a search engine. See which keywords resulted in someone finding your site.
- See what people do when they visit your site: which pages they view, which paths they follow, which actions they take, how long they stay there, and when they return to the site.
- Find out about your users and their computing environments: OS, browser versions, languages, screen sizes, number of colors, etc.
- Compare all of the previous measures over different time periods.
Setting Up Google Analytics
Google provides a free Web analytics service called Google Analytics. Once you sign up for an account with Google, you can register specific Web sites with the service. For each site registered, you receive a Javascript code fragment that is inserted into each page on your site. This Javascript code records usage info for your site, and the Google Analytics server collects and displays it. In this example, the code is standard for all sites using Google Analytics, but the unique ID assigned to your site is passed along to identify the transactions. Once you have inserted the Javascript code into your Web pages, it will begin to send transactions to Google Analytics. This code is usually placed at the very bottom of your HTML, just inside the closing <body> tag.
<!-- GOOGLE ANALYTICS -->
<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-1637920-14");
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>
Using Google Analytics
When you log into Google Analytics, you will have an opportunity to view the statistics about any Web site where you have installed the tracking code. Here are the top-level functions:
- Dashboard: the first thing you see for a site is the Dashboard, an overview of the top reports. You can customize this to add or remove different reports to your Dashboard. By default, Analytics shows the last 30 days. You can change this to any time range where you have data. Summary info includes: visits, page views, pages per visit, bounce rate, average time on site, and percentage of visits that are new.
- Visitors: this section gives you information about your site visitors: languages, browser capabilities, network properties like connection speeds, and new vs returning.
- Traffic Sources: tells where your traffic comes from: direct traffic, referring sites, search engines (including keywords), or paid ads.
- Content: top pages, landing pages, exit pages, navigation paths.
- Goals: you can track goals, such as when users click on a form, or complete a process funnel like a shopping cart, or click on a particular link, or whatever you want.
This just scratches the surface of what is available. There are a lot of tutorials out there about using Google Analytics, including material from Google itself.